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Monday, May 24, 2010

Is There Any Problem That Gets Better With More People?

Take your pick: medical care, food production, forest reserves, farmland, fossil fuels, automobile traffic, military conflict, education, air travel, water, fish population or good old quality of life. Greater populations stress just about everything.

There are the Panglossian dreams that more workers will produce more taxes for more government services, but the demand for services will always outsrip the supply of revenue.

The same applies to everything else. The more a human being has, the more they want. As there is no infinite resource, by logic there is a cap and a diminishing curve of supply of just about everything. At some point the demand curve will always rise above the supply curve.

Monday, May 24, 2010Is There Any Problem That Gets Better With More People? ----There isn't. I've seen Idaho go to hell, just in my lifetime, and it breaks my heart. CdAlene, McCall. I feel about the newcomers, just as the Nez Perce felt about us, just go, and stay, away, will you please. It's why I'm so in favor of the national forests. Keeps people like rat sweating in Arizona. And Las Vegas, that big vacuum cleaner, sucks 'em up. And, like our late great Helen Chenowith used to say, you got to be pure white, nordic, to put up with this snow. The southern europeans can't make it here. We are not know for Italians, Sicilians, that ilk. We haave a few Basques, but few and far between, and they came from the mountainous regions of Spain. You got to be tough, and be able to handle loneliness, a tough thing to handle. There are no year round beachs, here.

On the other hand, the rivers are beautiful here, too, if you know them, and above the hills, are the high blue windless skies. I hope to be a part of them, someday, forever. Leaves floating on the trout streams, leaves yellow from the cottenwoods......

Following passage of health care, enthusiasm for the president among Democrats soared. Today, however, just 49% of Democrats Strongly Approve of Obama’s performance. That’s down from a high of 65%. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary aberration or the beginning of a lasting change.

Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters nationwide favor repeal of the health care law. That’s the highest level of support for repeal yet measured.

Fifty-five percent (55%) say the plan will make the quality of health care in the country worse. Twenty percent (20%) expect it to improve the quality of health care, and 18% think quality will stay about the same.

Fifty-five percent (55%) also expect the health care plan to drive up the cost of health care rather than achieve its stated goal of causing those costs to go down. Only 18% believe health care costs will indeed go down because of the plan’s passage. Another 16% expect costs to stay about the same. ---Luckily, the EB is blessed by having a spokesperson for the enlightened 20%.

...her daughter's high hopes for a summer-long job as secretary for the local Jewish Community Center, citing her commitment to "culture, community, and the vibrant spirit of volunteerism" or some such. Also, it will help support her Friday-night bar hopping and sudden fondness for Whole Foods, which are 'spensive.

The Community Center coordinates local volunteer programs and I'll hand this to her: she's not being disingenuous when she remarks her own enthusiasm for volunteer work. She's done plenty of it and enjoyed it.

But the position itself IS a paid one. And she's eager to supplement her father's dole.

I grew up in a township in a Pennslyvania county that had one hundred farms and a thousand people. The memory is sweet and painful.

It is all gone. The people who live there now believe that they live in the country. They have no idea.

The streams are barren, but the people do not know what it was like two generations ago, when you could fish alone. I do not know what it was like two generations before me and what it was likes for thousands of generations before then, but it was nothing like it is today and it is not better.

You cannot love nature and love what it has become. Generations by the thousand came and left and hardly disturbed what it was.

Two generations of corporate developers and NY listed builders have taken all that away from all the generations that will follow.

At best they will live in an avatar.

There are over one hundred thousand people there now. The hills have been graded, fields, forests and streams corrupted. It is not a better place.

It is a wrecked relic.

It takes a thousand years and 5-10 major fires to create a forest to create the natural eastern forest enjoyed by at least two thousand generations of mankind .Three generations destroyed them so thoroughly that none existed within 50 miles of any major city.

The existing stands of contemporary trees, more numerous in numbers are nothing compared to the 100 meter high white pines, the vanished chestnut, the diseased hemlocks, the vanished elms and the understory of laurels all destroyed.

Some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.

A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.

In contrast, General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering — by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.

I've been down on the muzzies, it's true, I can't stand them, I always stand up for the Jews, I love them, as to the blacks, I'm neutral, though I think Zimbabwe is gone to hell, and South Africa is following, as to the Swedes, I'm always thumbs up. Simple as that. As to the Italians, I take them on a person to person basis. As to the English, I've always loved Churchill.

But, 'fore I go, just one thing about that video. That chart that went straight Vertical on the right? It could have been "Quality of Life," or "Length of Lifespan," or "Technological Development," or a whole host of things that are "Positive."

Half of ALL the Scientists that have "Ever Lived" are "Working Today."

"Of all the assaults that prompted a bus operator to take paid leave in 2009, a third of them, 51 in total, “involved a spat upon,” according to statistics the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released on Monday.

"No weapon was involved in these episodes. “Strictly spitting,” said Charles Seaton, a New York City Transit spokesman.

"And the encounters, while distressing, appeared to take a surprisingly severe toll: the 51 drivers who went on paid leave after a spitting incident took, on average, 64 days off work — the equivalent of three months with pay. One driver, who was not identified by the authority, spent 191 days on paid leave.

"Transit officials, facing a budget shortfall of $400 million, called the numbers troubling..."

"The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate...

Ford Motor Co. said Monday it will invest $135 million in two Michigan parts plants as part of a broader effort to bring production of key electric vehicle technology in-house.

The move is good news for employees at both factories, where work has declined dramatically over the past decade, and it brings the Dearborn automaker one step closer to hanging out the "Help Wanted" sign again in southeastern Michigan.

Beginning in 2012, Ford's Rawsonville Plant in Ypsilanti Township will take over assembly of battery packs from a supplier in Mexico, and the company's Van Dyke Transmission Plant in Sterling Heights will begin producing hybrid transmissions that Ford now imports from Japan...

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.